Nutrition, or good nutrition is a difficult, complex, personal and many times financial issue too. Plenty of diets are available –vegetarian, vegan, paleo, carnivore, omnivore, intermittent fasting …
…-; more and more healthy and innovative sports food is available on the market and you can easily get lost how to choose and how to hydrate. Regardless your nutrition preference one thing is the same for all. The human body works the same way, digests and stores the nutrients the same way in every humans and therefore here I can give you some basic guideline how you can calculate your energy intake while doing sport activities.
If you are a regular eater and healthy person and the workout is less than 60 minutes, you can do the session without eating anything before, however for women it is still recommended to eat some light carbohydrates at least about 1 hour before the session.
If the workout is longer than 60 minutes, it is recommended to eat a light carbohydrate about maximum one hour before your training session.
If the workout takes multiple hours you will need to calculate and make your nutrition plan carefully.
The majority of our energy comes from carbohydrate intake. A human can digest 60-90 gram carbs PER HOUR while during sports. This figure depends on your body size and your body weight but we can calculate it as an average figure. So let’s take it as an example 60g for women and 90g for men.
You cannot digest more carbs per hour even if you do more intake as this it the limit of absorption of our body.
| 1 gramm of carbs equals | 4,2Kcal |
| 60 grams (women) | 240 Kcal |
| 90 grams (men) | 360 Kcal |
If we are talking about an Olypmic distance or a Half Ironman we burn 700-1.000Kcal PER HOUR.
So count 700 Kcal for women and 1.000Kcal for men as an example.
Now let’s compare the two above figures.
I am a woman, I burn 700 Kcal per hour but I can only have 240Kcal per hour while I am doing sport. So how can I sustain doing this without collapsing?
The human body can store about 1.500Kcal in itself. Majority of it is stored in our liver as GLYCOGEN.
We can use that storage during sport but it takes 2-4 days to reload again. That’s why we do carboloading 3 days prior to our target race to fill up this storage. Carboloading means around 70% of your meal should be carb and the rest 30% is protein for 3-4 days prior to your main event.
So liver glycogen gives us energy for about 1 – 1,5 hours, however we cannot rely only on the glycogen storage so we need to start refuiling with carbs and protein during the session if it takes longer than 1 hour or multiple hours.
We can NEVER take enough nutrition while we are doing sports to make the balance between the burnt calories and the intake but we can POSTPONE THE LOSS and that’s why it is important to keep having nutrition not only on races but on long training sessions as well.
The best way doing it is keep eating at every 20 minutes even if you are not feeling hungry. Eat small bites but continuously and always drink water and electrolites at the time you eat.
After a long training or a race we crave for carbs as our liver glycogen storage is empty. There is a window for that to refill which is 30 minutes plus the lenght of the training. So if your training was 3 hours, your window is 3,5 hours.
For a recovery meal the best combination is 70% carb and 30% of protein. Good option is flavoured milk (chocolate, vanilla or strawberry) as it has contains all the necessary nutrients.
Remember the importance of your nutrition.
Whoever can eat more on a long distance race can finish stronger!